posted by Khurram

If you've worked with Blue Beetle recently, there's a good chance the topic of "usability" has come up more than once. That's because, like many of our counterparts, we believe it's a trait that no serious online marketer can afford to ignore – in the same league as search engine optimization or compatibility across different browsers.

Most clients understand this intuitively: the easier it is for people to move around your website and find what they're looking for, the more likely they are to decide to do business with you. The difficulty isn't in seeing the value of usability, but putting it in practice.

What's needed is a way to add features to an existing online platform, without having to sacrifice speed and performance for your visitors.
As it turns out, there is a tool that does exactly that. It's called AJAX, which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. While I'm sure that clears up the issue for those of you who spend your leisure hours looking through web design articles, maybe I should point out that in the real world, that basically means that AJAX allows your website to run more like a desktop application would – cleanly and seamlessly by displaying portions data dynamically, instead of refreshing the entire page when loading new data from the server.

The result isn't just an improvement in usability... it's a whole new chapter. By changing content and adding resources as your visitors input information, AJAX lets them read, shop, and navigate with a level of data and responsiveness that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.

For your website to be helpful to your visitors – not to mention profitable for you – it needs to have a high level of usability, and there's no better way to achieve that in this day and age than using AJAX.